OK, so maybe it was a bad idea to start a blog and then immediately go on vacation. Meh.
Ok, so in the my last post I talked about what distro I selected and why. Your mileage may vary of course, but Ubuntu works for me and much of what I will go through in this series will be related to Ubuntu.
Partitions
But regardless of what distro you end up installing, there is one piece of advice I would strongly recommend and that is to carefully consider your partitioning scheme. Back in the old days, partitioning your disk so that your data was separate from the OS was solid advice. As Windows evolved, though, it became less and less convenient. So much of what makes Windows productive is its tight integration and committing your personal data to locations other than Documents and Settings/Users caused as many problems as it solved. Further, Windows’ excellent in-place upgrade paths scenarios meant that in many cases it was not really necessary. It migrated your data for you and all was well. Yes, there were roaming profiles and as NTFS evolved we got symbolic links and all, but frankly none of them were easy to use and were poorly supported by applications.
Linux is a bit different for two reasons. One is that while in place OS upgrades are possible, they are not recommended. The other is that linking – symbolic and hard – is very well supported; couple that with the fact that Linux is not letter-centric with volumes (c:, d:, etc) and you can very cleverly partition your data, mount each partition in whatever directory you want and then get on with your life. Finally, unlike Windows which sets per-user settings in a global location (the Registry), Linux stores all per-user settings in the user’s home directory (for the most part – there are some exceptions, but that is another post).
So, you will definitely want a partition for your home directory so that when upgrade time comes, you just mount it in /home and when the machine boots, there is your data and most of your settings – almost all the ones you care about anyway.
If you partition your disk that way, then your OS partition really only needs to be about 40gig. In fact, that may be too big. I have pounded the software repositories and still only sucked about 25g of my OS partition up.
You’ll need a swap partition as well. There is a lot of advice on how to size this. In the old days back when my hair was all one color, we used a formula of 2x RAM for the partition size. But living with that I think it is too aggressive. On a 4gig machine, I have never used more than 1gig of swap, even with multiple VMs running. So, maybe a more conservative 1.5x RAM makes more sense.
If you dual boot, leave the rest of your disk for Windows as NTFS. Linux can read and write NTFS reasonably well (beware of large files), but Windows still has no effective mechanism for reading ext4, so to share data between your boots you will need NTFS somewhere in your pipe.
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